• Charlize Theron has nabbed the September cover of a slimmed-down Vogue. The issue counts only 584 pages, compared with the 840 pages of Sienna Miller's 2007 issue. Theron last made the cover in October 2007. [TFS]

• Kate Moss is the fall face of Just Cavalli. Splitting the difference between the competing trends of top- and bottomlessness, she poses for one ad in a tuxedo jacket and nothing else, and for another in some kind of leopard-print leotard. In a third, she wears a micromini sequined dress that seems to be held up with magic. [FWD]
• Legendary photographer Corinne Day — whose pictures of Kate Moss for The Face helped put the supermodel on the map — is facing a serious illness, and requires expensive medical treatment. Friends are trying to raise money by selling 500 prints of a 2001 photo of Moss nude on a bed; the pictures are £100 each. [LOVE, link NSFW]
• The first images of Jil Sander's hotly anticipated +J line for Uniqlo have just surfaced, and it looks fantastic. Japanese magazine Non-No shot seven looks from the men's collection, and it's entirely apparent that the German designer has not lost her talent for tailoring and her ability to pare down a look to its most basic, striking elements during her years in the fashion wilderness after being fired from her namesake label by owners Prada. +J, which hits Uniqlo stores this November, includes around 140 pieces of men's and women's wear, and prices start at $25. [Hypebeast]
• Macy's has announced that Ne-Yo will be the new face of Alfani's Red men's wear. [WWD]
• Uma Thurman has the campaign for Givenchy's new Angel or Demon perfume. [The Sun]
  
• Under Isaac Mizrahi's direction, Liz Claiborne continues to seek a higher-fashion image without shedding its affordability. To wit: this fall, Coco Rocha and her old flaming red hair star in a very kaleidoplaid campaign. Also, count this as another example of the models-in-the-supermarket fashion imagery trope. [Design Scene]
• Patrick Robinson and his design team at the Gap have been concentrating on the basics — and particularly on revamping the company's various styles of jeans. To advertise the offerings, the company has chosen a bevvy of top models, including Carmen Kass, Anja Rubik, and Arlenis Sosa, each identified with a particular style of denim — "The Boyfriend," "Curvy," "Long & Lean," etc. We wonder who it was, though, who chose to put the lesbian model Freja Beha Erichsen next to giant type that reads "Real Straight." [Models.com]
• Loeffler Randall is adding e-commerce to its website. [WWD]
• Jewelry designer Anna Sheffield's collection for Target hits stores at the end of this month. The pieces range from $19.99-$79.99; some are made of sterling silver. They all look very cool. [Lucky]
• You know the economy's terrible when Jessica Seinfeld serves pigs-in-blankets to Gwyneth at a charity gala. [WWD]
• In Paris, several recent fashion school graduates are starting their own lines — with a difference: instead of focusing on the tradition ready-to-wear, these young designers each want to do small collections made-to-measure for each client. And the prices are right: 50-80 Euros for a shirt, 70 Euros for a dress, 150 Euros for a jacket. In putting an affordable price on services that are something more than tailoring and something less than couture, with all its connotations of excess, these youngsters have almost certainly found a gap in the market. [DazedDigital]
• Meanwhile, shoe designer Jeffrey Campbell knocked off a Chloé boot. His offerings this season are basically just Ann Demeulemeester's and Balmain's shoes done for cheap(er). How is it this guy hasn't gotten sued yet? (Of course, Chloé probably took inspiration for their shoes from some vintage boots.) [The Greyest Ghost]
• And there are also instances of high-end brands ripping off less-expensive ones. Cf. Proenza Schouler's version of the Frye boot. [On The Fringe Of Fashion]
• After the record-breaking sale of all the art he collected with Yves Saint Laurent, partner Pierre Bergé plans to go ahead with an auction of furniture, sculptures, and textiles in November. The works are expected to fetch around $5.7 million; the proceeds will go to AIDS research. [WWD]
• Miss J's new memoir, Follow The Model: Miss J's Guide To Unleashing Presence, Poise And Power contains a troubling blind item about not being let in to a fashion show on the explicit instructions of the head of the PR company running the designer's front-of-house operations. The PR company seems to be Kelly Cutrone's People's Revolution, and the designer — specified as Brazilian — seems to be either Carlos Miele or Alexandre Herchcovitch. Was Miss J denied entry because he is black, or because he now bears the taint of Night-Time Tyra? The latter seems unlikely, since Miss J points out that the same designer later begged America's Next Top Model to use his line for the finale runway show when ANTM went to Brazil in Season 12. (That particular laurel went to Rosa Chá.) [Fashionista]
• The New York Fashion Week menswear schedule is out, and it contains some surprises. This season, Yigal Azrouël is killing his separate men's wear presentation, and combining his two shows into one. Philip Lim is doing the exact opposite, adding a separate men's wear presentation. [WWD]
• Feast your eyes on ShopBop's "WARTIME" array of products, and ponder the aestheticization of orchestrated human killing. [ShopBop]

• Here we have it, the first official glimpse of Kanye West's Louis Vuitton sneakers, aka THE BEST SNEAKERS KNOWN TO MANKIND EVER. The $700+ kicks were inspired by the movie Dune, and Kanye's own mind-blowing genius. [Racked]

• Former supermodel Karen Mulder has been arrested in Paris for allegedly making death threats to her plastic surgeon. When she quit modeling, Mulder alleged that executives at Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves offered to politicians, influential media figures, and other officials. Mulder then was admitted into a psychiatric facility; Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men she accused of abusing her, paid for her treatment. Marie was earlier the focus of a BBC sting operation that filmed him offering a woman posing as a 15-year-old model 300 pounds for sex, and talking of his desire to seduce as many of the teenaged contestants in the Elite Model Look competition, which was how Mulder originally shot to fame, as he could. Marie remains the head of Elite Paris. [Telegraph]
• Twiggy is back as the face of Olay — a company she first modeled for in 1985. [Daily Mail]
• Blake Lively would like you all to know that getting dressed is something she manages to do all by herself. "It would probably help if I had a stylist, but I don't," the actress said. Taking sole responsibility for that Met Ball monstrosity really is kind of ballsy. [WWD]
• Levi's is touting its button-fly 501s with a new America-themed, Ryan McGinley-shot advertising campaign. [NYTimes]
• Man cleavage: Is there a limit to how much you can take? Glamour wants to know. [Glamour]
• Lovebirds Marc Jacobs and Lorenzo Martone have had to push their nuptials back to August, because of the former's work schedule. They still plan to tie the knot in Provincetown, where Robert Duffy has a home. [WWD]
• Rejoice, "older" women, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Herein we dispense with the notion that women of a certain age "can't" wear florals, short skirts, bikinis, dresses that show cleavage, especially "pufftastic" cleavage such as older woman Liz Hurley's, and tops that reveal bare arms, and then we append a series of limits and guidelines on how, precisely, such items should be worn. The rules to dressing are dead. Long live the rules to dressing! [ToL]
• Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell was seen on the premises of Topshop HQ, and that must mean she is in talks to design a namesake clothing line with the British retailer. [Mirror]
• Bulgari's new scent, Blu II, is inspired by "a modern vision of the color blue" and advertised by Laetitia Casta. [NST]
• Michael Kors' Fall 2009 ad campaign stars...Carmen Kass and Noah Mills. Add Kors to the list of designers sticking with the tried-and-true this recession, then. [WWD]
• Hartmarx has lost three top executives. The bankrupt company, which was just bought by the private equity fund Emerisque, just had its senior vice president and CFO, the president of its women's wear division, and the group president of luxury. Emerisque takes control of the company on July 7. [ChicagoSunTimes]
• Johan Lindeberg, the founder of J. Lindeberg, has reluctantly left his label over creative differences with Proventus, the Swedish investment firm which has owned the business since 2007. Proventus hired a new design director without seeking Lindeberg's input, and the women's wear line which was supposed to relaunch under the direction of his wife, Marcella, never materialized. The partners have designed Justin Timberlake's William Rast line for the past three seasons and earned plaudits for it from the fashion press — but rather than make William Rast their sole creative outlet, the Lindebergs plan to launch a new line, called Paris68. It'll feature made-to-measure tailoring for men, dresses for women, and high-end denim and leather jackets for both sexes. [WWD]
• Children's wear retailer Best & Co. has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. [Crain's]
• The Met is screening three fashion-themed movies as part of its "Model as Muse" exhibit. And even better than the films are the people the museum has arranged to discuss them: model Carmen Dell'Orefice will be on hand for Funny Face on July 10, Qui Etes-Vous, Polly Maggoo? will be discussed by its title actress, Dorothy McGowan, and Isaac Mizrahi will talk about the 1995 documentary that features him, Unzipped. Tickets are just $10. [Met]
• Mizrahi is also curating an art exhibit at Manhattan's Julie Saul gallery. The summer group show features works from Maira Kalman, Julia Sherman, Wayne Thiebaud, Donna Chung and Jane Freilicher, and it's open until September 12. [WWD]

[London, April 27. Image via WENN]

Elbaz, who has long won accolades for designs that consistently hit at the sweet spot of the continuum between beautiful and interesting, started off in the industry working on "horrible mother-of-the-bride dresses" in New York's garment district. Given a leg up by Geoffrey Beene, who took him on as an assistant, Elbaz eventually earned his first head designer position at Guy Laroche in 1997. A stop at YSL followed, but what Elbaz is known for is the eight years he has now spent at Lanvin.

In the pages of the New Yorker's Style Issue, Levy captures Elbaz's uneasy relationship with the images of luxury he so skilfully creates. Elbaz is 47, and, Levy writes, "there seems to be something fundamental about him in need of comforting." He is also overweight, and in a moment that must ring familiar to almost any woman on earth, Levy observes him dithering over his breakfast order at the Carlyle Hotel: " 'Should we be good today or bad? Maybe we start good and get bad later.' He ordered the fruit salad. He wanted the pancakes."

Some designers are, or at least seem, to the manner born: Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, and Tom Ford, et. al., embody the moneyed ease and supreme self-assurance their particular labels sell. Other talents clearly retain something closer to an outsider's perspective, some sense of a life beyond the lifestyle evidenced through frumpy outfits or quiet demeanors. (Some designers, like Marc Jacobs, start up in one camp and end up in the other — the early Jacobs, with his nerd glasses, pallor, and paunch is orders of magnitude away from the contemporary gym-toned, tanned, health-farm Jacobs; it's like looking at an El Greco and then a Botticelli.) Elbaz is clearly in the more modest category. He compares his job shaping the dreams and expectations of the select group of women that are his customers to working as a concierge in a fancy hotel — the concierge being the person who has to go home at night. "You have to go back to reality. You have to go back to nothing in order to maintain the dream," he says. "The moment the dream becomes reality and you start to mingle too much with all these people..."

Photo by Tim Walker

Levy's profile really heats up when she contrasts Elbaz's aesthetic with that of Tom Ford, who took the Moroccan-born Israeli's job at YSL Rive Gauche a few months after Gucci Group's acquisition of the brand in 1999. (Yves Saint Laurent had at the time been grooming Elbaz as his successor.) Ford, in Levy's construction, was the spirit guide and permanent booster of the ra-ra bling-bling late 1990s and early 2000s, while Elbaz was the quiet talent cut out for more unassuming times.

Ford could not have been a more maddening foil. Where Elbaz was pudgy and Jewish and self-doubting, Ford was toned and tan and Texan. Elbaz is shy and still not exactly a household name; when Ford guest-edited an issue of Vanity Fair, in 2006, he put himself on the cover, flanked by Scarlett Johanson and Keira Knightley in the nude. Perhaps most significant, Elbaz has always presented in his work a quiet, complicated conception of female sexuality. One of Ford's more memorable ads as the designer for Gucci featured a woman [Estonian supermodel Carmen Kass] pulling down her underwear to reveal the letter "G" shaved out of her pubic hair.

Perhaps the New Yorker's sense of propriety forbade Levy from mentioning Ford's other boundary-stretching campaign of the period, when, during his time with YSL Rive Gauche, he chose to advertise the men's fragrance M7 with a full-frontal nude portrait of martial arts champion Samuel de Cubber.

"But," writes Levy, "little by little, as the money and the grandiose sense of self-assurance of that era fell away, Ford's sensibility came to seem less stylish." The writer narrates Ford's retirement from women's fashion and the Gucci Group, in 2004, and mentions that a pair of cufflinks she recently browsed in Ford's eponymous Manhattan men's wear store costs $34,000. Her conclusion:

In our current moment, Tom Ford, with his tan, and his cufflinks that cost as much as a car, and his naked-man-on-bearskin-rug aesthetic, seems distant and comical. He has become Bijan. And Alber Elbaz has gradually won.

If Levy's skewering of Tom Ford, whose idea of recession-friendly pricing is a pair of jeans that costs $990, is a delight of schadenfreude, it's also a little easy. Elbaz, and his aesthetic, were never in any mortal danger after being cut loose from YSL; the designer walked into a dream position at Lanvin, where the label owner's only instruction was to "Please wake the sleeping beauty" less than a year later. Moreover, Elbaz's clothes for Lanvin are every bit as expensive as Tom Ford's were for Rive Gauche and Gucci. It's difficult to imagine many women who can admit a $4,000+ sheath dress into their wardrobes without hardship.

Elbaz explains the huge cost of his garments in terms of their materials and workmanship — which is true to a point. (The markups that retailers typically add, which can be 60-70% over wholesale prices, go unmentioned by both Levy and Elbaz.) Elbaz, who alternates in the profile between the airy fashion-speak of one who spends his life on the astral plane of aesthetics, and more articulate quotes, analogizes making a dress with the research and development requirements of pharmaceutical companies. "Doing a collection, for me, is almost like creating a vaccine," he says. "Once you create the vaccine, then you can duplicate it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. But see if you can create it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, and the answer is no. In that sense, I have absolutely no problem with the prices. I don't think we do it just to do it." (It's also worth pointing out that the Lanvin atelier is located in France, where garment workers earn a middle-class living, and where Elbaz claims his company pays 65% taxes.)

The designer has said in the past that he does not care to design the dress that will make a man fall in love with a woman; he wants to make the dress that a woman wears when she falls in love herself. But I'm not sure the rhetorical inversion necessarily works: although I appreciate woman-centered design, that departs from the first principles of the wearer and her needs and desires, as opposed to those of the implicit male observer of the dress, whoever knows ahead of time when they're going to fall in love? A dress to make you more loving is a curious idea indeed.

At times, Elbaz seems flinty and difficult, which can often be the downside to being a visionary (at least for those who surround you). When he visits a potential site for his fall/winter show with his team, a former load-out station in the 13th Arrondissement, Elbaz speaks in a stream-of-consciousness that must be impossible to parse. "I had many, many thoughts. The dogs. The black car waiting outside. The man with the white coat and the dirty hands. The crystal on the floor and the train station just in the back. I'm looking for something to clean my eyes!" He muses for a while on the "bad spirit" of the warehouse space, before, in what comes across as a self-pitying gesture for its very unseriousness, momentarily contemplating leaving fashion. There's also an episode over some handbags which aren't to his liking, and an hours-long meeting with the team of architects who are at work on his London store, in which he exclaims, "If a woman comes in and it doesn't smell right or the light isn't right, she will think the dress doesn't look good!" Elbaz sometimes seems like that maddening boss who expects everyone to do the right thing but cannot articulate what it is.

All in all, I think Levy's thesis — that women have moved beyond Tom Ford's sexy dresses, and into the prim refinement of Lanvin under Elbaz — isn't entirely spot-on. Any woman, no matter her career or age, wants at least occasionally to look hot; if that note is missing on Elbaz's scale, it's a lack. And it's a heartbreaking statement about women in general that Elbaz should have such a presumed accord with our needs because he personally understands feelings of physical inadequacy. (When Levy asks him what his life would be like if he were thin, Elbaz doesn't skip a beat: "Amazing.") But Elbaz's work as the concierge of Lanvin, ironically, displays all the assurance he himself can't seem to muster. He never exhibits the clumsy pretty-ugly tics of Miuccia Prada — he knows real women don't want to look dowdy. His idea of sexy is never louche, like Roberto Cavalli's. His clothes are tailored, but not restrictive like the work of Roland Mouret. Intellectual touches don't impede wearability, as they can at Comme des Garçons. ("If it's not edible, it's not food," says Elbaz. "If it's not wearable, it's not fashion.") Alber Elbaz's work, for those who can afford it, is classic without the connotation of dustiness. And it's nice to get to know, at least a little, the fevered, nervous, visionary personality behind the curtain.

Ladies' Man [New Yorker — sub req'd]
Ariel Levy On The Designer Alber Elbaz — Audio Slideshow [New Yorker]
Lanvin Fall/Winter 09 Collection [Style.com]

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